


color bleeds

by feralphoenix



Category: Blaze Union
Genre: Coming Out, Don't copy to another site, M/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Sexual Content, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 18:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21324532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Some questions are asked, some questions are answered, and Nessiah considers the merits of just telling Garlot everything.
Relationships: Garlot (Blaze Union)/Nessiah (Yggdra Union)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	color bleeds

**Author's Note:**

> _(the questions are complicated and the answers are simple_ – gravity pulls, so make it work for you.)
> 
> this is for the [transbingo](https://transbingo.dreamwidth.org/) challenge on dreamwidth which is extremely cool and which you can enter at any time up until the first round closes june '20 so any interested parties get in on that!!!!!
> 
> also i think its been like four years or something since ive written these fellas to which i can only say Whatte the Fucque...

It’s almost routine, at this point, almost wearing well enough to form grooves: Roughly midnight, or a little later; moonlight and starlight through the window, sitting on the edge of the bed so that the edge of the mattress is just this side of uncomfortable where it digs into the base of your behind. Left hand holding your skirts up politely in your lap, and lately the right hand over your mouth to muffle any sort of noise you don’t intend to allow loose.

(Your breath still rushes and your chains still clank when they waver, but better that than shouting or something, and thus alerting half the barracks to this nightly pastime. Jenon is insufferable enough as it is with only two fistfuls of invented reasons to hate you; he doesn’t need any more oil poured onto that particular fire.)

The other half of the equation: Garlot on his knees on the rug before you, first two fingers loose at the root of your cock, thumb playing idly at your balls, rest of the hand splayed warm and kind on the base of your belly. His other hand most oft busy steadily palming himself, and his talented mouth working your head and shaft.

The portrait of him before you would, alone, justify the constant expense of energy and by now second-nature management of your magically simulated sight. Night casting every color into deep blues turns the red of his hair into richly jeweled hues of mauve, and when he raises his eyelids enough to look you directly in the face the tawny gold of his eyes is silvered to a pale honey. You aren’t sure if he’s aware how good he looks and is willing to use his handsomeness as another weapon in his repertoire, but he looks _very _good and it’s irritating as stepping barefoot in a patch of nettles.

But even if you gave in to your own pique and cast yourself back into your natural blindness solely so his looks wouldn’t affect you, that would not mitigate a damn shit. Garlot was already good the first time but by now he _knows _you, has learned your likes and your weak points with a rapacity that your peers—if they knew of these trysts, which they do _not_—would wish he’d turn to learning his letters. He holds his tongue flat along the underside of your shaft as he leans his head down, slow, slow; his breath rushes and he hums around you as—presumably—he comes. This pulls orgasm from you like magnetism, easy as flipping a switch; you lock your knees and arch your spine and grit your teeth against the cry that wants to fly free. You do not like to feel so predictable, but your body never gets tired of this and so gives happily to the sweet warmth, the rhythmic contractions of Garlot swallowing your come, the single white-hot gasp in which lies the cessation of all conscious thought.

His hand is still going at the front of his pants when he sits up and wipes his face on a careless wrist. This may be the prompt, but what really motivates you, if anyone is to ask (they won’t), is the fact that all your centuries alive have taught you a deep mistrust of routine and how it tends to make one complacent.

“Would you, ah—” a pause for breath here, as your voice is still shaky; “would you like some help with that?” Garlot looks blank, so here you gesture broadly at the busy hand. “It would be no trouble, and this way I could at least pay you back in some way for the many occasions of exquisite oral sex with which you’ve lavished me and insisted all the while that I don’t need to lift a finger.”

The hand pauses, and Garlot blinks at you for a second or two; you don’t really have time to do much more than begin to worry you’ve been too verbose before he grins and laughs, soft and low. He shakes out his ponytail and then reaches with the unoccupied hand to tuck his loose hair back behind his ears where the motion had dislodged it. “Nessiah,” he says with obvious patience and humor, “sex isn’t, like… some powder-keg political situation you’ve got to carefully balance? You’re not in any sort of _debt,_ I’m not keeping track of your account? I know you’ve got limits, it’s not a big deal, and I _like _to suck dick? I like to suck _your _dick. I’m having a good time over here, you don’t have to worry about it.”

As always, you imagine most of the impact of your looking down your nose at him is lost thanks to the interlocked plates of metal over your face that obscure your eyebrows from view. Garlot is not a liar; he’s about the furthest thing from it, all burning earnestness and ready honesty, heart attached firmly to sleeve, but you have been around the block too many times before to not expect that some form of reciprocity will be needed eventually to head off potential problems.

“Garlot,” you tell him, gentle and bracing, and settle the skirts of your robes back over your lap so that your hand will be easily free to reach out and brush against the side of his cheekbone, graze over the smooth skin there. “I remain as always very thankful for the conversation we had when we began this arrangement, and that you let me lay out the various sex acts that I would need to work up to before attempting. It has been a delight and a relief that you have chivalrously refused to push me on those limits.

“But all the same, I _must _stress that it would not go anywhere near those limits for me to give you a—a handjob, or something. If you’re worried about the chains being very noisy and a turnoff, I can assure you that I am quite skilled at keeping them out of the way so I don’t wake the whole wing when I masturbate.”

This makes him laugh, as you intended, but then he looks at you like he’s _calculating, _almost, and the grin stays on his face but it fades just a bit.

“The thing is, that’s…” Garlot begins, and then he trails off, still considering. “I’ve been kinda… glad? That we tend to keep a lot of clothes on. That I can, you know, that I can get away with only stripping from the waist up. And I’ve always had this… this _feeling _that you sorta get that, too.”

You do, in fact. There is no way that you could fully strip without taking your mask apart, and if you turned your back to Garlot to spare him the gruesomeness of your torn-up face and empty eyelids he would then see the ruin of your back.

And he might not… he is the type of man to have enough sensitivity to not ask, you feel reasonably sure in guessing. But he’ll still guess, even privately; anyone would wonder, at such an enormous wound, though surely no natural denizen of this world could hit upon the truth. The only control you have in this situation is in choosing whether or not he knows. It’s one more reason among many to be jealous of your bare body.

“I’ve also got,” Garlot says, halting, and narrows his eyes, “limits. Handjobs aren’t—aren’t one of them, but there’s still things you’d have to know about me first, and those are… things that only Siskier and Jenon and the people of Nether know about me.”

“I can understand that,” you say, careful. “If you would rather just leave things at this, I know not to push until you feel ready to volunteer the information yourself.”

“No, it’s,” he says, and keeps staring directly into your face, like he’s searching for something. Like he’s _finding _something. “Maybe it’s just because you’re this—this sage of the woods and there’s so much more about the world that you _know. _But I think I’m actually… I think I might be cool with you knowing?” Here a half-smile, and his face takes on that peculiar cant that always sends you back to the very heart of the forest, where he met with you on your front steps and could not keep his eyes off of you, all flushed and windblown and clearly not just from battle. It had kept distracting you from the horrid cramped mess of his bound-up powers’ reminding you powerfully of the claustrophobia of attempting to bind your chest flat over a full thousand years ago, welcomely so, because the distracting factor was that he was very cute. He is, still, very cute. So much more now that you know him better.

“I think,” he says, startling you back into paying attention instead of just staring at his flushed mouth and the stray smudge of semen on his chin that he missed when he wiped his face, “I really trust you, Nessiah.”

There are so many things this boy probably should not trust you about. You don’t have the time to be wry about that to yourself, though, because he untucks the idle hand from his crotch and levers himself up to his feet instead, all shoulders and biceps. There is maybe ten seconds’ worth of room for you to admire the bare skin of his chest and stomach, the gold cast that’s muted in the moonlight and the dozens of old and new scars, the line of red hair starting below his navel and trailing down: Then he matter-of-factly undoes the fly of his pants and carefully rolls them down his thighs.

Your eyebrows shoot up. You have the self-control to not make an ass of yourself and go _Oh, _out loud. Garlot lets gravity take over the pants situation, and then kicks a little when they come to rest in a heap atop his feet. He nearly stumbles at this, pulling one leg after the other; you reach out to grab his hand and balance him while he says _shit _a lot under his breath and steps out of the pants successfully.

“Well,” he says at last, a little red in the face as he lets go of your hand. Instead of letting the arm fall to his side he gestures at his wet thighs and his very large deep-red clit, and says “Ta-da.”

There is a barely detectable note of nervousness to his voice now, so you nod once and say, “That does indeed clear some things up.”

Garlot is still looking at you like he’s knocked some precious vase over and is afraid to check to see whether he’s cracked it, and you know no better way—no _other _way—to soothe that worry, so you push down the worried flutter in your own stomach and go on, deliberately: “I remember well enough from when _I_ still had one of those to know I’d need to cut and file my nails before I should really try helping you out with that, yes.”

He sighs, all the tension in his body sluicing out at once, and the warmth in you tells you bone-deep that it was worth it. His face goes through several different emotions almost too rapidly for you to perceive, and then he blinks rapidly for a bit and smiles all crooked and his expression settles into curiosity.

“See, I thought,” says Garlot, a little too casual, looking at your bed like he’s trying to decide whether it’s worth smearing precome all over your sheets, “I thought for a while you might be—you know, you might be like me. And then we got into all this and I saw you have a dick, obviously, so I just assumed I was wrong and put it behind me? I’ve heard rumors there’s… operations and shit if you’re rich enough and have good connections but the same rumors say there’s still no way to, like… completely trade your junk out. That like even if you have a real good healer it’s difficult and you’ll probably wind up with a smaller dick than a cis guy. So is the rumor mill just super wrong or…?”

“First of all, you can sit,” you tell him, patting the mattress beside you. He does, sparing you a potential crick in your neck from having to look up. “Second of all, I would not recommend my transitioning methods to others, and I do not think it would even be _possible _because I have no idea how to contact the people who did this for me. Some things are beyond even my power.”

“I’m not—asking because I want to do it too,” Garlot says. “I got to avoid sprouting tits as a preteen so I’m pretty fine with how my body looks and feels, I like having a pussy. I’m just curious.”

“Well, in _that_ case,” you say, and shrug one shoulder lightly. “I merely created a new body for myself—a fair duplicate of my previous one but with a little judicious editing to be a more accurate vessel for my soul. It’s a very rare and particular magical art—one related to the Tactics Cards we all use to cast magic beyond ourselves by invoking ancient contracts made in the age of myth. Great magicians from a faraway land taught it to me when I was younger.”

_“Wow,” _Garlot says to this, wide-eyed and with his brows vanishing beneath his bangs. “I mean. What the _fuck, _that is so overboard, but also brilliant and sort of terrifying. I guess that explains how you’re so good at necromancy. What the _fuck.”_

“It’s really only the knowledge of anatomy that’s useful in either skill,” you tell him, almost apologetic. “Raising skeletons or corpses for your own personal army is rather more common a sort of magic. Much more accessible. That’s why necromancers are a copper a dozen on this continent.”

“Oh, a _copper a dozen,” _Garlot says, elbowing you very gently. “Like just any old necromancer could just summon an _entire army _at the drop of a fucking hat to lovingly antagonize _any _old scouting party come with a job offer, without any prior warning except your mysterious vague-ass prophecies.”

“The theory, at least, is accessible,” you allow, half giggling. “The thing is merely that I am just extremely good at what I do.”

“At least you’ve earned your massive ego,” Garlot teases. “But god. Making yourself a whole new body. There’s got to be _some _story behind all of that.”

You take a deep breath.

You _could—_you could tell him, right now. If not every horrible detail you could tell him most of it. You could merely ask him if he would hear you out about something serious, if he’s all right with getting that story, with forewarning that it will be a sobering one. He’s very trusting. He would believe you.

You could tell him about how _once upon a time there was a war between faraway worlds, and the gods became so desperate that they broke every taboo to create a race of soldiers from their own bodies, their own flesh and blood, a new absolute underclass of angels, created only to fight and to win._

_And one of those angels turned around and said to the gods and to their magi and their generals, Excuse me, I believe there’s been a mistake with how my body came out, as I am a man and have no use for these parts. I would like you to fix it._

_And no one had time for the angel’s one simple request, because it was war, and because the angels only existed for one purpose so his discomfort was immaterial, and because even an ordinary angel should be too lowly a being to demand something like that, and a million other stupid senseless reasons, so no matter how many times the angel insisted that something be done he was always turned away._

_And in being turned away so often the angel learned resentment and distrust, and questioned orders and refused to obey, because he was freshly made and had not yet learned enough not to perceive himself as invincible._

_Until finally when the angel was set to receive his holy weapon in exchange for that which was most precious to him, he refused, and told the gods and their magi and all the world of the heavens that he would not sacrifice it—that if they wanted something of his they could have the breasts he did not want and the genitals he had no use for, because it was a mistake that he had ever had them in the first place. Surely this was the least the gods and the world could do to make up for his having to live this way up until now._

_Perhaps this would merely have been dismissed from any other, but this angel had already been branded a troublemaker, and so he was punished._

_But no matter the torture he was put through, no matter the humiliation visited upon him in the name of convincing him to conform to the role the gods had bestowed, he would not capitulate, and so finally his body was torn apart, his full powers were taken away, and he was thrown out like so much trash because Asgard had no use for anything with a mind and a will of its own, anything that would not be a simple cog in its machine—_

But if you tell him—if you tell him that, even if you hold back that you will never forgive the gods and that you intend to destroy them in payment for what they did to you—he can never unknow it.

Maybe he can already guess at the vague shape of some things that have happened to you but—but confirmation will change the way that he sees you. And maybe you don’t want that, yet.

There’s no way of knowing how it could affect your plans to be so open about yourself, either. And you cannot afford that after all that you have worked for, all that you have done. Not when you’re so close to the goal.

So instead you tell Garlot lightly, “I had to trade an eye for this, you know.”

His face contorts. _“Seriously?”_

“Very seriously,” you say, nodding. “I was not always blind, you know, and these things always have a cost.”

“I _guess,” _he says, “but like. Yuck.”

“Worth it to get rid of the dysphoria in my opinion,” you tell him, and you can’t stop the giggle from bubbling up. There are so many more benefits to your power, but it is your honest opinion that this is one of the nicer perks.

“Makes me even more glad I get to evade that if I just take medicine regularly,” he replies. “Like, there have been a couple times where testosterone should be fucking embarrassed about what I’ve had to do to get my hands on it, but my friends and my general age group in Nether pitched in more than once to keep me from getting _too _desperate. Or having to steal frequently enough it could get tracked back to me.”

“I would venture that you had it hard enough in your own fashion,” you say. “You’re all right now, though, yes? You did say that only Siskier and Jenon are aware of this amongst our compatriots.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine now,” Garlot says, holding up both hands to assure you. They’re large, broad hands with thick fingers, nothing like yours; even if the doses were sometimes irregular he definitely grew up with the boon of his ideal hormonal balance. “Velleman actually _pays _me. I get to buy the good shit, and also fund hormones for a few old neighbors too. Money is dumb and sucks as a concept but getting to provide for people now I have a reliable source of it is pretty fucking sweet.”

“All right,” you tell him, and smile. “Well. Now I at least know to give myself a manicure in the near future, so our future nights won’t be so one-sided.”

At this he blushes all the way down to his chest. “Yeah, I—wow, yeah, okay. Yeah. There’s some—there’s some, _stuff, _I should probably get first too. For—for safety’s sake and all that.”

“Condoms,” you supply, carefully.

Garlot breathes in as if to speak; his gaze wanders past your face a foot or so. “That—too,” he says at length. “Although that’s something I—I’m gonna have to work up to. It’s not, like, a hard no. I’ve, uh, I’ve definitely thought a lot about doing that with you, I _do _want to. To try it, and know what that’d be like, with somebody I like. It’s just…” Here he shakes his head. His long hair sways. You don’t know how he can allow himself to be this vulnerable.

“If it means anything,” you tell him, voice quiet, pressing your weight against the floor subtly enough even you can barely perceive the muscles of your feet flexing. “If it means anything, that is something I would have to work up to as well. For… similar reasons to everything else.”

Garlot looks back to you here, and then down at his naked body and your clothed one. He lays his hand over yours, between you on the mattress. As always his palm is feverishly warm.

The moment lasts almost long enough to become awkward, because there really is nothing either of you can _say _to make the mutual confession weigh less. Maybe it would be different if you wanted to actually talk about it, but there are so many reasons why you don’t. Garlot must have his own reasons, too, why he doesn’t.

His thumb traverses the ridge of your knuckles. You lean just a little into his side in lieu of shivering.

“Well,” he says. “I guess I should—I should probably get back to my own room sooner or later unless we want to be gossiped about. But.” He turns. Lightly kisses the side of your head, so you can’t feel the press of his lips through your hair but for the pressure. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“I believe that should be my line,” you tell him, and straighten up where you sit so he’ll be able to stand. When he smiles at you it’s like a small sun.

(The day will come, eventually, when you will wish you had simply told him everything this night. When you will wonder what future could have been possible, if you had. But to realize the true weight of the missed chance would require admitting to yourself your true depth of feeling, and you’ll never be ready for that until it’s all too late.)


End file.
